The number of security incidents involving mobile devices has increased over the past year, but companies are not protecting their mobile assets as well as they do other systems. One in three organizations admitted to suffering a compromise due to a...

Digitally transforming enterprises are now able to seamlessly integrate a myriad of service providers and business partners globally through diverse private interconnections. Equinix’s Global Interconnection Index volume 2 (GXI2)...

Networking vendor Juniper Networks has rolled out a new security architecture that will connect and operate with an enterprise customer's existing stack of products.
Named ‘Juniper Connected Security’, the open platform automates...

Rapid digitalisation has resulted in a surge in both the number of endpoints and the means by which cybercriminals can infiltrate enterprise networks. Around the globe, the total financial damage due to cybercrimes is predicted to reach $8 trillion...

Topic

Global supply chains and trade networks are becoming more complex as a result of shifting patterns within the logistics industry, including changing demands of vendors and customers.
In reality, not all businesses are able to navigate these...

Public cloud services are a strategic weapon for CIOs. More than a way to cease operating data centers, the public cloud offers CIOs the ability to focus on strategic projects aimed at boosting the bottom line.
“As organizations pursue new...

VMware preps milestone NSX release for enterprise-cloud push

Looking to ease deployments of software-defined
networks while reinforcing automation and security
for hybrid and multicloud customers, VMware has taken
the wraps off of a major release of its NSX-T Data Center
software.

While the NSX-T 2.4 announcement includes over 100 upgrades,
VMware said the release anoints NSX-T as the company’s go-to
platform for future software-defined cloud developments.

“This is NSX-T’s coming out party—it is now our primary platform
and includes all the tools, services, security and support for
future growth,” said Tom McCafferty, VMware’s senior director of
product marketing for NSX.

Introduced in 2017, NSX-T Data Center software is targeted at
organizations looking to support multivendor cloud-native
applications, bare-metal workloads, hypervisor environments
and the growing hybrid and multi-cloud worlds. A version of the
software called NSX Cloud is a public-cloud/hosted version of the
software. It already supports other cloud systems from Amazon Web
Services to Microsoft Azure to IBM Cloud and its own VMware Cloud
on AWS.

VMware offers NSX-V for its significant installed base of VMware
vSphere customers. vSphere is largely based on
technology VMware bought when it acquired Nicira in
2012 for $1.26B.

Playing up and advancing NSX-T is the next logical step for
VMware and its customers, experts say.

“The future of applications will be distributed (hybrid IT and
multicloud) and heterogeneous (legacy applications and
cloud-native applications),” said Brad Casemore, IDC's research
vice president for data-center networks, in an email.
“NSX-V was built for VMware’s vSphere and its SDDC
[software-defined data center], not for this new reality of
cloud-native and multicloud.”

It’s a significant development for at least a couple reasons,
Casemore pointed out. “First, a growing number of VMware
customers are choosing to run containers on bare metal and/or in
public clouds, and that drives a need for something like NSX-T
rather than NSX-V, which is what many have today,” Casemore
said. “VMware will strongly encourage that installed base
of users to migrate and transition to NSX-T. Additionally,
VMware’s SDN and network-virtualization competitors – all the
usual players – are seeking capitalize on the market shift to
cloud native and multicloud – no longer the exclusive preserve of
VMware VMs.”

VMware is battling Cisco with its Application Centric
Infrastructure, Juniper with its Contrail system and others like
Pluribus, Arista and Big Switch.

The key components of NSX-T 2.4 that could drive the most
customer interest include the ability to quickly turn up and
securely manage software-defined network resources. Specifically
NSX-T 2.4 adds an HTML5-based interface that reduces the number
of clicks required to complete configuration tasks and includes
installation enhancements such as Ansible
open-source automation-platform modules to enable
automation of installation workflows.

The system creates what VMware calls a declarative policy model
to enable a one-step approach to configuring networking and
security for applications, VMware wrote in a blog outlining
NSX-T 2.4 enhancements. VMware says the model drastically
simplifies network automation by letting users specify what
application connectivity and security needs are as opposed to how
networking and security should be configured step-by-step.

“This approach eliminates the need for a tedious set of
sequential commands to configure networking and security services
which is time-consuming and error-prone. The declarative
interface takes in simple, user-defined terms the connectivity
and security requirements for the application environment
specified in [a human-friendly JavaScript Object Notation
(JSON),
data interchange format file added in the new release].”

“These policies are platform-agnostic and easily replicable,
simplifying operations and allowing IT teams to scale to new
levels,” VMware stated.

Helping customers more quickly and easily handle network
provisioning, configuration and automation is the goal,
McCafferty said. “These were tasks that held back the
wide-use of software defined networks – we can now remove those
challenges,” he said.

According to VMware, some other enhancements to NSX-T 2.4
include:

Support for advanced security capabilities such as Layer 7
application context-based firewalling, identity-based firewalling
and whitelisting. The whitelisting feature supports fully
qualified domain name (FQDN)/URL and applies to east-west traffic
in the distributed firewall and it lets customers whitelist
specific traffic going from a VM to a specific FQDN or URL.
Benefits include support for communication to a different
system/application in a multi-site environment, support for
applications that use native cloud services and support for URL
domain on the internet, VMware said.

NSX-T can scale to hundreds of thousands of routes, over a
thousand hosts per NSX domain, and enables high-scale
multi-tenancy. Previously the software supported thousands of
networks, per instance, VMware said.

Support for IPv6 in NSX-T 2.4 which addresses a critical
global problem and a key requirement of cloud-scale networks,
VMware said.

“VMware has done well with NSX, and it continues to grow, but the
next stage of market growth in data-center SDN will involve
multicloud and full-stack networking for containers,” Casemore
said. “VMware knows this, and that’s why you’re seeing them
pivot so strongly to NSX-T/Cloud.”